Mercy Bell, Analyst at Dogpatch Advisors, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• As a young woman of color, Mercy was unusual in B2B tech sales. She sees an echo chamber in sales and on LinkedIn of white men of a certain age and experience.
• After college, Mercy was the second hire at a startup. At age 23, she had a $3.7 million year in enterprise sales. In her family, she was the first to graduate high school, first to graduate college, and first to get a desk job.
• Mercy worked at the fundraising call center for Stanford in the Great Recession. Her territory was Stanford graduates on Wall Street, many of whom had lost their jobs. After four years, she was prepared for sales.
• Mercy talks about the “in-the-moment” creative decision tree Dogpatch Advisors reps follow to position their software for their customers.
• Mercy’s first memory as a child with her mother was people asking her, “Where are your parents?” She felt she was constantly giving people an “explanation of self.” That “why me” type of exercise helped her in sales.
• Mercy describes how she crafted email messages in sales to make the technology the first experience for the customer with herself as the rep to be the second customer experience. Her appearance was an advantage.
• Mercy tells Dogpatch Advisor reps that the first sentence you write in a cold email is the first experience and impression the prospect has with you. Make it memorable and focus on accuracy and creativity.
• Creativity is necessary. Andy advises taking risks. Mercy notices an incredible fear of experimentation. Mercy implements a “manual-to-scale” loop for companies.
• Creativity is unique to individuals. Mercy explains how to scale creativity using an example of how she would use the data concerning a company in an email.
• Mercy has ideas about what sales managers can do to encourage improvisation in their reps. Managers need to workshop habitually with their rep teams.
• Outbound Operations takes the burden of prospecting burdens from reps to give them time to explore the human connections creatively. Outbound Operations is not Sales Operations.
• Reps should not do data entry and follow arbitrary rules. They should be doing human communication. Happy reps will be supported and retained. Mercy and Andy discuss what attributes in a rep are relevant to customers.

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(Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul)